Adam, can you let go of your penis a second and listen, please?

It’s Future Adam here, with an important message. I know you think, standing there, trousers around your ankles in this depressing, windowless room in the Fertility Clinic, jacking off to Lesbian Vampire Academy is going to be a one-time, funny anecdote you’ll tell at parties, but you’re very wrong.

You’re actually in a pivotal life moment. The start of a year-long ordeal. You will get to know these terrible lesbians very well. You and your girlfriend’s fertility problems are about to consume your life and push your relationship to its breaking point. She’s going to lose mind and start a war with her body. You will not know how to help her. You will not survive IVF unless you listen to me now…

1. You do really, really want a child.

Like many men, you will never admit this to anyone else, or even yourself. Because the more you admit you want something, the more you can be hurt if you don’t get it. Look at Mick Jagger, you’ll think. He was still banging out kids in his seventies. I’ve got plenty of time.

No, Adam. You don’t.

Just because a truth is awkward, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pull up a chair and sit with it: you were ambivalent about having kids until you met her. You don’t want a child, you want her child. So, you have exactly the same amount of time she has, and not a second more.

If you believe otherwise, you and her diverge. Solving infertility becomes her project. She’ll be the one knowing the things and making the appointments and consulting the doctors and scheduling your passionless sex. You will become merely: The Sperminator.

This fertility project is going to be very heavy; please don’t make her carry it alone.

2. No One Who Hasn’t Been Through It Will Understand

There are eight billion people in the world, and there are credible rumours that they all started as babies. Therefore, how hard can it really be to make a baby?

For most people: not hard at all. For them, having a baby doesn’t require medical interventions, financial strain, and the shiniest science. If anything, it actually requires less effort and less restraint than not-making a baby.

Not for you two, though. But here’s what you don’t know: many men around you have also had fertility issues, they just won’t talk about them unless you do first. And if you do? They’ll open up about how they also felt like failures. How their relationship barely survived. And you’ll all feel less alone. Do it. Offer. Share. Shame is a vampire, it needs the dark. Your job is to let the light in.

3. The Desire for a Child is Not Like Other Desires

Over the next year, everything will feel unbearably high-stakes, and yet you won’t fully understand why. Here’s why: If you don’t get your dream job, you take another job. Colleagues, projects, e-mails, meetings that should have been e-mails — it won’t be as good, but it won’t be that different either.

If you don’t get the apartment you want, you take another apartment. A kitchen, shower, a bastard landlord that doesn’t return your calls about leaks in the kitchen and mould in that shower — it won’t be as good, but it won’t be that different either.

If you want a child but can’t have one, you…???

The desire for a child is an existential wish. It is a yearning to no longer be the most important person in the universe. It is the hope to set your identity on fire. It is the noble goal to build something much bigger than its parts: a family.

There’s no substitute for this. No second choice. No back up plan. Or so it will feel. And that’s why people without this wish won’t understand your suffering, and why several of them will suggest that if it doesn’t work out, you can always get a golden retriever.

4. Yes, that feeling, it is grief

Many feelings you’ll have during the next year are confusing and hard to name. When she gets her period each month, the lowest dip on a rollercoaster made entirely of plummets, you’ll feel a sharp, spiky sorrow that will last three to five days.

You know how, on a birthday, there’s this extra special joyous kick to existence? Everything just pops? These days are the exact opposite of that. They are UnHappy NonBirthdays. Ironically, during them, you will still eat a lot of cake, often while thinking, it feels like I’m grieving. Can I be grieving? Doesn’t grief need loss? But nothing is over yet. There’s always next month. Always something else you can try. Another IVF nuke you can fire. What have we lost, exactly?

Potential, Adam.

Every time it fails, that little pile of potential becomes smaller. Potential for what? Why, only the chance to experience the most profound, terrifying, life-altering love on the planet: parental love.

It is grief that you feel. Don’t judge yourself for it. Don’t dismiss it. Don’t shove it down. Emotions are like toddlers, ignore them, and they throw incredible tantrums.

When you feel grief, grieve.*

5. Just Because It’s Not Happening in You, Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Happening to You

Throughout the whole process, you will keep telling yourself how much worse she has it. After all, she’s the one injecting herself with hormones, harvesting eggs, and feeling the monthly failure inside her person. You will decide that since she’s suffering so much more, you should shut up about your suffering.

Don’t do that, Adam.

That only widens the divide and contrary to popular belief, silence isn’t actually noble. While your experience isn’t equal, you will share it. Just because you’ll do less, you’ll do plenty. Just because you’ll feel less (they won’t pump you full of hormones), it doesn’t mean you’ll feel nothing. You will be made to watch the person you love most in the world suffer intensely. And that, my friend, is shitty. You might as well just be honest with yourself, her, and everyone else about that.

6. Go to Therapy, You Stubborn Moron.

In the coming weeks, she will read books and a million academic papers and go to support groups and do therapy and form networks in that wonderful way women do, collecting resources and knowledge and coping strategies like they are limited edition vinyls.

You will do nothing, and try to pass that off as stoicism. Men, honestly, sometimes it feels like we’d rather fail alone than have to succeed together.

When she suggests therapy—either alone or as a couple—don’t say, “I don’t think we need to spend any more time thinking or talking about our fertility problems.”

Because there is a difference between thinking and talking more, and thinking and talking better. Therapy is better.

Fortunately, she knows you well, and even if you don’t take all this wonderful advice, you’ll still get lucky twice. Firstly, because she’ll force you to go on a ten-day silent retreat where after a particularly torturous session on day four, you’ll run crying into the woods, punch a tree, and talk to a worm which talks back, scaring me so much that you furiously murdered nearby ants, get a confusing erection, and have many realisations—about how your mind works, about how much you want a child, about why you suppress your emotions.

Then, you get lucky again: IVF works, and just in time. You will have a daughter, and fortunately, she will be mostly her mother, and so, magical. You’ll be able to sit down years later, from within your Happily Ever After to write this, ostensibly to yourself, but, really, to all the other Adams out there—standing in a clinic, pants around their ankles, completely unaware of what’s coming.

And to those Adams, you’ll say: don’t do what I did. Do better.

*I’ve always felt the Five Stages of Grief should be gender separated, and that men’s are: Anger, Alcohol, Denial, Denial, Denial.

I slammed the door behind me and trudged out to the street, pushing the buggy. Every time I blinked, my eyes stuck like an old door. My daughter, Runa, had been up five or six times in the night, scared by nightmares she couldn’t describe.

It was Sunday. Wait, was it Sunday? “Big tree,” Runa said, as we entered the park.

“It’s delirious,” I said. “No, wait, that’s not right. It’s deciduous. That means it loses its leaves at, err… some point.”

“It needs to find them,” she said.

I parked the buggy and sat down on a wooden bench. Next to us were a beautiful young man and woman, their hips touching. The woman held a pink feather boa. The top three buttons of the man’s suede shirt were open. They were luminescent and immune to temperature. I realised, with grief, that they were still yesterdaying. The woman gushed about an upcoming holiday to Georgia, where she’d stay in a “fruitarian free-love conscious chakra community.”

“Amazing,” the man said. “Totally.”

I’d always wanted to go to Georgia. I’d even made a Google Doc once. But then… well, I knew what had happened. Who had happened. I glanced down at Runa. She was throwing her crisps up in the air and trying to catch them in her mouth, completely without success. I sighed. My limbs were as heavy as oak trees. Why did I decide to have children again? There had to have been a good reason, but I couldn’t remember it. There was a lot I couldn’t remember these days—interrupted sleep hollows out the mind.

To leave a legacy, perhaps?

No, the problem with legacies is you’re too dead to enjoy them. Unconditional love? She’d screamed at me for seven minutes at breakfast because I gave her the wrong colour cup. Her love seemed quite conditional.

“I want a drink, papa,” she said.

I handed her a bottle shaped like a badger.

“I said I want milk.”

“No you didn’t. And I don’t have milk.”

“But I want MILK.”

“There’s no milk.”

“We can buy milk.”

“We’re in the park. And I have juice.”

“I HATE juice.”

“You liked it this morning.”

“You’re a mean papa.”

Because all our friends were having kids? No—we’d been early in our friend group. Having a child had cost us socially. Late-night lust? Primal instinct? If only. Runa was IVF. She had been a multi-year odyssey. We’d nearly lost our minds.

None of the usual reasons fit, I decided. The disgustingly young couple began discussing the health benefits of licking a Peruvian tree frog. I was probably too old now to lick any sort of frog. I stood up and pushed Runa away. We walked in silence. I was with her physically, yet far away mentally—my mind playing time like a xylophone, binging and bonging up and down the decades: twenty years into the future (Runa’s university graduation day), thirty into the past (when I wet myself in geography class).

“Cheeky bird,” Runa said.

“Sure,” I said, too tired to lift my head. There would be a bird somewhere. There are always birds. Cuckoos, for example. Could I trick someone else into raising my child? Then I’d finally get some sleep.

“PUDDLE!” Runa screamed, leaping out of the buggy, nearly tripping over, righting herself, and dashing away.

“Stop!” I shouted, because I’d forgotten her wellies. Splosh. Too late. She was ankle-deep and grinning up at me like a tiny lunatic. She jumped up and down, stuck out her tongue, flapped her arms. She was having the best time.

“My feet are swimming,” she said. “See?”

“Your socks are wet.”

“They don’t mind.”

I laughed. Not at her—with her. Which made her laugh. Which made me laugh harder. Could this be the reason, this laughter? It felt closer to it. No-one laughs like children. No-one lives as fully, either. When they’re sad, they’re devastated. When they’re happy, they’re punch-drunk delirious. They don’t feel, they become. Or rather, succumb. I remembered how I used to be like that, too. Back when finding a twenty pence coin on the walk home from school was like discovering treasure. When eight streets from my house was as exotic as Georgia. When I didn’t need to lick a Peruvian tree frog to get high, I could just do a roly-poly.

I was still laughing. Around her, I did all my best laughing. The effort of raising her often made me feel old, but it just as often made me act young. No, it was more profound than that, somehow, I decided. Her youth didn’t simply remind me of my youth—it helped me feel it. Her first encounter with a flamingo becoming my second-first encounter. Her wonder at a rapidly ascending elevator reactivating my childhood belief that I had magical powers. Because children don’t just give us a future, they give us back our childhood. More than that, even. Because our childhood informs theirs, which reawakens ours, which further enriches theirs. I suddenly understood that my parents must have felt this too. Watching me splash in a puddle, they must also have re-experienced what it felt like to be a child, healing parts of their own childhood in the process.

Each generation gets to be young twice: once in their own childhood, and again through their children’s eyes. Even through the thick fog of tiredness, I understood what an immense privilege that is. The chance not just to love someone fully, but to remember what it felt like to be loved completely, when the world was new, and full of wonder. And yet, the chance to re-experiencing your own childhood isn’t a reason people cite for having children. Standing there in the park, watching my daughter’s socks soak, feeling long-dormant things stir back to life in my chest—I felt sure that it was the greatest reason of all.

“Move over, kid,” I said, positioning myself at the edge of the puddle, feeling the best kind of silly, bending my knees, ready to jump.

Our host entered the room, hips swaying. She was Silvia*, a striking American woman in her early forties. “Hi,” she said, flashing a mischievous smile. “Great that you’re here. We’re going to have so much fun. I mean, we’re not. But that will be fun. Maybe?” She let the question hang in the air, enjoying the awkward chuckles it elicited. “I should probably start at the beginning, right?” Her grin widened. “Many people,” she began, “they discover kink, go to a few orgies, have an amazing time at first, but then they get bored. They reach a kind of ennui and think, well, what’s next? What’s left? How am I going to top that?”

I gulped. I’d never attended an orgy. In fact, if sex were a shop selling ice cream, I’d only ever ordered a single scoop of vanilla, hold the sprinkles. I felt conspicuously out of place and hoped that the people around me, who surely were fearlessly sexual, wouldn’t notice. I vowed to stop gulping.

“This is what’s next,” Silvia declared, lifting her arms dramatically. “After the orgy comes the boredgy.”

A few nervous titters rippled through the room. I scanned some faces and felt a small measure of relief when I saw that they looked as afraid and confused as my own.

“I think boredom in sex is the last great taboo, you know?” Silvia continued. “Like, I’ve had some partners to whom I’ve said, ‘Do you mind if I read a book while we fuck?’ And you know what, they were fine with it. I think that was a kindness, you know? From me to them.”

Laughter filled the room, nervous edged. “I want you to look around,” she instructed, letting her gaze drift among us, “and notice which people you’re attracted to, so you know who you’ll not be allowed to hook up with in a minute. Because it’s like, why should we have sex with people just because we’re attracted to them, you know? Like, why should that be a criterion? A boredgy is an orgy where you’re not allowed to show pleasure. Okay?”

A hand rose. Not mine. I didn’t feel confident enough to interact with her directly. She seemed so shameless and uninhibited—the two great demons I was here to do battle with.

“A question?” she said, cocking her head. “Great.” Her grin faltered as, apparently, she remembered the rules. She firmed her face and flattened her tone. “I mean, fine. Whatever. Go ahead.”

“S-so,” a young woman said, her voice catching in her throat. “Like, if we see someone we want to play with, or rather, don’t, then we would just go up to them and say, ‘I don’t like you, want to fool around anyway, sort of, maybe?’”

More nervous laughter.

“Well,” Silvia said. “There’s no need to insult them. But other than the first part”—she flashed a sly smile—“perfect. Or, another position that’s good for this is one I call the starfish.” She lay on her back. “Cindy, come over here?” A woman slid over, mostly on her bottom, legs out to the side, mermaid-ish.

“We’ve played before, and we do actually have chemistry, but we’ll pretend we don’t. Can you just dry-hump me, Cindy?”

Without hesitation, Cindy climbed on and humped Silvia mechanically, with all the passion of someone completing algebra homework.

Silvia lifted her head to address the room. “And so, yeah, I just lie back and do nothing, see? I’m consenting, of course. That’s important. We all know why we’re here and what we’re exploring.” Silvia’s voice softened. “The rules of consent still apply. We’re just playing with consent. We’re bending it. Okay, get off, Cindy.”

Cindy obeyed, without fanfare, returning to her spot by the wall.

“Okay,” Silvia said, clapping again with a kind of grim finality. “Condoms and lube are over there.” Her hands snapped together like a clapperboard. “Let the boredgy begin.”

The room buzzed with nervous energy. Quite a few people fled for the exit. I felt a sense of pride; I wasn’t one of them. Instead, with a deep breath, I shed all my fear, anxiety, shame, anguish, embarrassment, inhibition, mortification, self-doubt, insecurity, guilt, regret, panic, cynicism, scepticism, self-loathing, social awkwardness, self-consciousness, fear of rejection, dread, self-sabotage, envy, bitterness, distrust, apathy, loneliness, inadequacy, pessimism, self-criticism, fear of intimacy, self-pity, existential dread, humiliation, sense of inferiority, abandonment issues, chronic worrying, perfectionism, procrastination, emotional overwhelm, nervousness, compulsive thoughts, mistrust, body-image issues, and general spindly wimpiness and stepped forward.

Oh, who am I kidding? They came with me, that whole neurotic parade, banging their drums and blowing their horns and doing their very best to sabotage me before I’d even begun. It was a wonder there was space for anyone else, yet there must have been because about twenty people moved into the middle. Ten stayed at the edges.

I lay down, feigning boredom while secretly dying inside. My mind whirred. What did success look like here? Did I want someone to pick me? Because if they did, wouldn’t it mean they didn’t find me attractive? Wasn’t it actually better if no one came to play with me? But if no one picked me, everyone would see that. I’d just lie there, alone and rejected.

It was a mess in my mind.

Before I could neaten it, a figure was looming over me. The person was a woman, twenty-five, perhaps, wearing a blue vest and black velvet trousers, her brown hair tied loosely in a ponytail. She peered down at me as though she were a scientist examining a moderately interesting specimen of gnat. “I suppose,” she said, with an accent that was either soft Australian or hard Kiwi, “I could …” She tapped her chin. “That floor space free, is it?”

“It would appear so,” I said, mustering an air of indifference that didn’t match the giddy relief surging through me. I was thrilled. I was chuffed all the way up. Even if she didn’t find me attractive, she had at least found me, and that meant I was no longer alone, which is almost always the worst thing to be.

She lowered herself onto the floor beside me with deliberate sluggishness. She propped herself on one elbow, mirroring my pose. Our faces were angled away from each other but close.

“You’re there now,” I said, while staring a bit at her, but also over her, and out into the room.

“It seems so,” she said. “You’re here too.”

“Well, I was here first.”

“Show-off.” She looked me up and down. “That’s it then, is it?”

“It would appear so.”

She ran a hand languidly up her front, brushing her stomach and breasts. “People touch, sometimes.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Should we, do you think?”

“I suppose it is an option, yes.”

I liked that she was very clearly in charge. I wasn’t physically attracted to her but because she had picked me, I guessed I wasn’t hers either and that was confusing, but everything is confusing, and, blessedly, at least this interaction was happening quickly, fast confusion trumping slow confusion.

She wriggled closer and clamped onto me, sideways and all at once. She ran her hand slowly and dispassionately up my leg.

“It’s a leg,” she noted.

“I’ve always thought so.”

“How many have you got?”

“Two at last count. You?”

“The pair.”

“Predictable.”

“I aim to disappoint,” she said.

“I don’t even have to aim to disappoint,” I replied, and we broke character briefly to laugh. “Can I check?” I said, about her legs.

“If you absolutely must.”

I stroked her lower leg, which she hadn’t shaved.

“That’s not good.”

She stroked my calf.

“They’re very large,” I said.

“No, they’re not.”

“I’ve terrible trouble buying trousers.”

“I’ve terrible trouble caring.” She let go to grope herself. “You probably want to see my breasts?”

“Err … if I must,” I said, which was a lie. I wanted to see them very much.

“Here they are,” she said, sitting up and removing her vest and bra, which unclipped at the front. She clamped back onto me, harder, her bare chest warm and solid against my side. A lot was happening, and I didn’t really know how to deal with any of it, so I decided the best approach would be to just keep swimming along with it, and see where it would spit me out.

“You probably want me to take my clothes off?” I ventured.

“Not particularly,” she said, but she detached herself to let me undress down to my boxers. Then she reattached herself, her movements crisp yet sad.

“Starfish?” she asked.

“It is the best fish,” I said.

She climbed on top of me then went limp, her body simply flumping on top of mine, her face turned away, to the left, mine looking to the right, which gave me a good view of the many similar pockets of equally pitiful dry-humping happening around us. Three women were standing and fondling themselves. A man in a wheelchair who was dressed as a nurse was masturbating alone by the door. Her hand went around her back and found its way to my groin. It lifted my penis and gave it an indifferent squeeze before letting it drop.

While I wasn’t aroused, I certainly wasn’t bored.

“This is boring,” she declared.

“Yep,” I lied.

After a while, she clasped me on the shoulder. “I’m ending this interaction.”

“I thought it would never end.”

She got up. Her eyes met mine. “You did disappoint me.”

“At least there’s that, then,” I said. “At least we’ll always have that.”

She moved on to a different man. I sat up and looked around at the room, full of people with blank faces engaging in not only loveless but also passionless erotic interactions, and even the occasional act of robotic copulation. I wondered how those men were staying erect. Actually, I kind of worried about those men.

No one else came to play with me, and I didn’t have the confidence to initiate. The crushing awkwardness of the whole thing grew to be too much. I became dizzy with it.

Steadying myself on the wall, I got up. After getting dressed, I left, more confused than when I’d entered but having had an experience, having done something, of that I was sure.

This is the part where there's supposed to be a satisfying conclusion—it gift valuable, wrapped neatly, bow tied.

I could offer you that, I could gift you that, of course I could.

I could talk some more about the woman who'd approached me. I could say how in that brief moment before the awkwardness set in, there was something real in her eyes. Not desire exactly, but at least curiosity. Recognition that we were both explorers in a strange territory. And that it was a connection both meaningful and wonderful, and something I keep. Something I revisit.

I could do that. I could say that. Maybe I even believe that.

Or, I could say that subversive ideas don't need to succeed to have value. That their subversiveness is justification enough for their existence. They're like intellectual crowbars, prying open the sealed boxes of conventional wisdom to reveal what's actually inside. Their job is to break the box. That's it.

I could do that. I could say that. Maybe I even believe that.

Or, I could write about how in a world that keeps dangling the shiny promise of More while make Less affordable, at least the boredgy was willing to admit that many of our sexual encounters are performances.

I could do that. I could say that. Maybe I even believe that.

But really, I think, mostly, in a world that constantly asks us to make neat sense of everything, to do the work, arrange, package, and share the insights gleaned from every experience—to optimize even our confusion into productivity—there's something meaningful about creating spaces for magnificent, purposeless bewilderment. To resist the tyranny of the takeaway.

And so I'll conclude here, yet conclude nothing.

*For discretion, I’ve changed the names and indentifying details of everyone.

Our family home was full of love and emotion, but didn’t hold a single cook book. In fact, my mother had just two dishes in her repertoire. Her signature—which I’ve never seen anywhere else, and so assume she invented—was called Tuna Fish Pie. A strange name, as if you’ve got the word tuna in there, the fish is kind of implied. Also, it had just three ingredients: tuna, baked beans, and mashed potato.

Her second dish was salad, sort of, but not like you’re imagining. My mother was a no ingredient-left-behind salad maximalist who thought nothing of combining tuna, lettuce, grapes, pineapple and feta.

She really loved tuna.

The only thing she never put in a salad was any kind of dressing. She thought salad dressing was a conspiracy of the bourgeoisie.

Her salads came naked, but they felt no shame.

Growing up in a house like this, I learned not to care much about food. If I got hungry, I just put the nearest edible thing in my mouth, and got on with my day. Food was fuel, nothing more. Like petrol for a car, except sometimes the petrol had grapes in it.

It was a system that served me well until, in my early thirties, I met a woman who was spectacular and flawless. Both a true sensualist and a great cook, I discovered on our second date, when she made a stunning curry.

“What’s this,” I said, pointing to a green thing within it.

“It’s pak chai.”

“Come again.”

“It’s pak chai.”

“Okay,” I said, unsure if I was being informed or insulted, but feeling my culinary horizons widen. After that amazing meal, we went to a house party where she was the first one out on the dance floor. Watching her, and I had too, because apparently she was also rhythmically blessed, I thought about how the best thing about new relationships is the permission they give you to reinvent yourself.

I felt the future fork before me. On the one prong: Old Adam - narrow of mind, poor of culture, a man who considered cheese and crackers a sophisticated meal.

On the other side: New Adam - a dancer, cook and hedonist.

Which did I want to be? The answer was obvious, and I strode out to the dance floor, shameless as one of my mother’s salads, and I danced with that woman. Badly, but with conviction.

The weeks passed blissfully. We kissed so much our lips blistered. But as I got to know her, I discovered things that complicated my simple assessment of her: she struggled several things that came naturally to Old Adam.

She hadn’t grown up in an emotionally intelligent household, like mine. In hers, objects were sometimes thrown against the wall. Moods could suddenly shift and arguments exploded out of nothing, rolling in like bad weather, and then suddenly out, never talked about again.

Feelings were dangerous territory. As a result, my consistency baffled her. I’d often catch her studying me, a wry look on her face, as if I were a magic trick she was trying to solve. She seemed genuinely surprised that I kept turning up. That my feelings for her were so completely steady. Which shouldn’t have been surprising, really, since I was a man who’d eaten tuna fish pie two nights a week for ten years and never complained.

After many evenings at hers—where she effortlessly produced elaborate meals while I marvelled and cut the vegetables—it became time for our first dinner date at mine. I knew this was an important next step. Another fork in my personal road. I wanted a future where I could name more than three types of nut, and who could casually disappear into the kitchen only to return with a quiche of my own creation.

These were ambitious goals for someone who, despite being thirty-two, still didn't own a cookbook and had never once followed a recipe anywhere. But how hard could it be? I found what looked like a simple pumpkin soup recipe online. I didn't have scales, a mixer, or an appropriately sized saucepan, but I figured I could improvise. I went food shopping, ingredient list in my hand, already enjoying the new, cultured man I was becoming. Someone who whizzed through the herb section because he definitely knew the difference between coriander and parsley.

Back home, I started cooking with the enthusiasm of a contestant on a TV cooking show. Everything was going surprisingly well until, just as she was due to arrive, the recipe instructed me to "pour in one cup of vegetable stock."

I had purchased a large jar of stock powder. I opened my cupboard. There were several cups of differing sizes. Which “cup” could they possibly mean?

Time was running out. I grabbed the biggest coffee cup I had, filled it to the brim with stock powder, and tipped it in.

The soup darkened.

The soup thickened.

The soup became an angry sludge.

The doorbell rang.

“I’ve destroyed the soup,” I announced as I opened the door.

“You can’t destroy a soup,” she replied, and we rushed into the kitchen.

For the next thirty minutes, we worked side by side to save that soup like emergency room surgeons.

“Onions,” she called.

“We’re out.”

“More pumpkin,” she demanded.

“That’s all of it.”

“Bigger saucepan,” she called.

“I only have one saucepan.”

“Get one from the neighbour. How much stock did you put in?”

“One coffee cup.”

“Of powder?!” she said. “You’re supposed to dilute it.”

We threw everything we had into the pot—more water, a can of tomatoes I found in the back of the cupboard, rice, and some questionable herbs. Nothing worked.

“You’ve destroyed this soup,” she finally admitted, turning off the hob.

I laughed. “But you can’t destroy a soup.”

She turned off the stove and turned to me with that familiar expression—part amusement, part bewilderment. “You’re not even annoyed?”

“Why would I be annoyed?” I opened the freezer. “There’s always pizza.”

“All that work. And you wanted to impress me.”

“I wanted to spend the evening with you.”

She smiled. “I know.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be a good cook,” I said. “I just don’t really care about food the way you do.”

“You don’t need to become a good cook,” she said, slipping her hands around my waist. “You don’t need to become anything. You have plenty to offer.”

For weeks, I'd been trying to transform myself into someone I thought she'd want. Someone sophisticated, cultured, who drank wine and danced and knew what a butternut squash was. But she didn’t need me to be a sensualist. What she needed was someone who could remain steady when everything went wrong, who could find humour in disaster, who wouldn't disappear when things got complicated.

“My dancing?” I joked.

She winced. “Not your dancing, no.”

We both understood what she meant. I had noticed by then that it was me steering the emotional side of our relationship. She knew Yotam Ottolenghi. I knew Esther Perel.

That night in my tiny kitchen, we failed at soup. But we succeeded at something better: we proved we could work as a team. She brought passion, expertise, the spice. I brought something harder to name—stability, humour, and the ability to keep showing up.

We both learned it.

Eight years later, we’re still together. We have a child now too, a tiny person who loves food as much as her, but is as undiscerning with it as me. Someone who eats a gourmet curry one night when her mother cooks, and spaghetti with butter the next six when I cook—and all with equal enthusiasm.

Our roles have become clearer over time. She still brings the colour and spice to our lives. I wanted to become the pak choi in our relationship—exotic and unexpected, but I’ve accepted I'm the stock, the foundation that everything else builds on, reliable and essential, even if not particularly exciting on its own. The one who remembers to buy milk and stays calm during our daughter’s meltdowns. The one who calls family meetings and makes sure issues get resolved.

There's no recipe for a successful relationship. But if there were, I think the key ingredient would be this: being willing to keep turning up, stand side-by-side, and throw all you have into the pot.

In the middle you…? Meander around, mostly.

Today is my forty-second birthday. I’m now very much in the middle of what I can hope will be My Story. My middle is also proving quite the jumble. For most people, entering your late thirties is a time when you finally realise the aphorisms were right all along: you can dance like no-one is watching, because no-one is. In fact, no-one ever was. It’s quite a relief, and you can watch them sigh contentedly, then relax into themselves, at long last.

I learned about the Spotlight Effect early. I’m on the opposite arc, with a growing awareness of the finite where previously there was only great gaping infinite. I give a fuck now, because I don’t know many fucks I’ll have left to give, and how good those fucks will be.

Fuck.

And while I don’t have a map, I have a feeling quite a lot of what’s ahead is located uphill of here. So, I’ve decided to write down the lessons that mattered until now, with the hope that I won’t forget them.

Forty-two rules for forty-two years:

Act I: The Setup (Rules 1-14): On learning, creating, and finding your place

1. All advice is meaningless, especially this.
When people talk about their success you can stop listening, but when they talk about their failure, pay attention; failure illuminates, success blinds.

2. Often, the only difference between good advice and bad advice is timing.
More important than working out what someone needs to know, is working out if they're ready to hear it. Sometimes we need to fail and flounder a while, and that's okay. Any time you want to give someone advice, ask them a pertinent question instead.

3. Everything worth saying has already been said, but those that were listening have already forgotten and those that weren't, didn't hear.
Popular culture repeats itself every five years. You don’t need to worry about being original, you do have to worry about being heard. A large audience is worth much more than a brilliant message shouted into an empty substack (like this one).

4. You have to pick one thing and get good at it. There is neither, a choice nor a shortcut.
The better you get, the more time you’ll have to enjoy your mastery. The best time to start with yesterday. The next best time is after a bowl of ice-cream.

(For better or worse, Adam, you have picked writing/story. Respect it, it’s too late to go for mastery in anything else now, but the thing you have picked, or picked you, is complex enough to do for the rest of your life, so there’s that. Congrats.)

5. Success has two prerequisites: you need to get good at something (see 4.) and get good at telling people you are good at that particular thing aka The Luck Surface Area. Everyone forgets the second part.

6. The arc of success is long, but it bends towards the prolific.
Of the sixteen books I've written, the one I wrote in three weeks sold more than a hundred and thirty thousand copies, the infinitely better one that took ten months has shifted less than five hundred. The world is random and will stubbornly defy all your best predictions. If you don't know what plates will stick, the only hack is to throw a lot of them against the wall.

On that note:

7. The cheaper you make your life, the more flexible it can be, the more whimsy you can indulge in, the more interesting both the life and you become, the more plates you get to throw.
Pick a Pareto city where you can get 80% the lifestyle for 20% the rent. For everywhere else, there are holidays.

8. Until you’re financial free, you should always know your Freedom Figure (exactly how much your lifestyle costs you each month) and your Lifestyle Burn Rate (how long you could live your current lifestyle if you stop earning money, i.e. Savings / Freedom Figure).

Life, for all its many virtues, is not a well-calibrated machine in which you pour in talent and hard work and what comes is a matching lump of success. That are many variables between you and the interesting, createive, independent life you want, and most of them are completely out of your control.

The one thing you can influence, however, is how long you stay in the game. Every hour that you don't have to spend waiting tables to pay rent is an hour you can invest writing, drawing, making music or whatever tickles your soul.

Move somewhere deeply unfashionable. Have too many roommates. Eat from tins, or even bins. Find your clothes on the street. Or, if that’s all too dramatic, at least figure out how much it costs to be you, then ruthlessly cut that figure to the bone. Being a creative involves great sacrifices of geography, security, friendship, comfort, and luxury. Are you willing to make them?

9. What you desire is less important (unless you desire heroin), than that you desire something.
Humans are like sharks, we're meant to keep moving forwards. You should fear apathy like you fear cancer.

But remember:

10. All returns diminish.
If you find anything that doesn't, or that diminishes really slowly: treasure it, then build your life around it.

(The only ones that work for you, Adam, are friendship, flow, and story.)

11. If you're not using your money to buy time to do things whose returns do not diminish, you're using it wrong.
The good part of everything is the start, never the end. Retire first, work hard at the end, if you still have to. Once you’re middle class, greater happiness lies in gratefulness than acquisition. The former is much, much harder.

12. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, but better yet to need neither.
And a related Conor Oberst quote, “I’d rather be working for a paycheck than waiting to win the lottery.” Self-employment is the best employment. Self-publishing is the best publishing.

13. It's better to be average at something in demand, than brilliant at origami.
Whether the medium is the message or not is less important than that the medium dictates the size of the audience waiting to hear that message. Go where the masses are, then give them what they want to hear.

Iconoclasts die empty of stomach, but full of regrets.

14. Some things are harder for you than other people but MANY things are easier.
When you're despairing over something that's harder, keep in mind all the things that aren’t. Build your life, or at least your career around what’s easy for you.

Act II: The Complications (Rules 15-28): On people, relationships, and the messiness of being a person in the world.

15. One person's destiny is another person's dumb luck is another person's deserved reward is another person's unfair punishment.
Almost all of what we see is behind our eyes. Therefore:

16. When in doubt, do.
Regrets are too cognitively heavy to carry, so you can trust you’ll find a way to discard/reframe/ignore them. You are a post-hoc rationalisation machine.

17. Everyone thinks they're the good guy.
If you’re not a hypocrite, it’s only because you don’t stand for anything. You're not the good guy. Neither is anyone else. But it’s better to understand why they think they are, than to write them off as just being wilfully malevolent. On that note:

18. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” and “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.

19. It’s much easier to learn to like who you are than try to become someone different.
It’s like swimming with the tide instead of against it, in a lead suit.

20. If you do want to be someone different, change country.
If you don’t want to be your normal, put yourself somewhere no-one knows what your normal is, and where there is no normal, for you.

21. Some people would rather fail alone than succeed with other people.
You cannot help them. You should pity them.

(Also, you are one of them, Adam; work on this.)

22. The general arc of most people’s adult life is something like this:

Sex is the answer!
Travel is the answer.
Money is the answer.
*Status* is the answer.
Sex is the answer (again).
Drugs are the answer.
Love is the answer.
Buddhism is the answer.
There is no answer.
There isn't even a question.
Fuck.
How am I going to fill all the time?
Children.
Where did all the time go?
Death.

Or if you prefer things expressed in the worldwide currency of fucks:

Childhood: Fuck yes!
Teenhood: What the fucking fuck?
Early Adolescence: Fucking, yes!
Twenties: Giving too many fucks
Early-Thirties: Giving no fucks
Late-Thirties: Children. Fuck.
Early Middle Age: Unfuckable?
Late Middle Age: Fuck.
Old Age: Fucked.

Unless they’re family, it’s going to be hard but not impossible to have a meaningful friendship with anyone more than one stage above or below you.

23. You aren’t doing it wrong, we’re all doing it wrong.
Youth is wasted by the young, titillation is wasted by teens, superficial trends are traded by the twenties, mastery is wasted by the middle aged, safety is wasted by the senior.

Side note: Curiosity is rarely wasted by children; spend time with children.

24. If you can't explain it to your parents, you either don’t know it well, or shouldn't be doing it.
Nothing is new, but it often comes wrapped in several new layers of shiny new bullshit e.g. crypto.

25. Every romantic relationship is two years of bliss and x years of perfectly personable, worthwhile companionship.
Everyone is a bit disappointing in the end. Especially you. How good is the average Tuesday? is probably the best metric for evaluating who you should be with. You’re not picking a body, you’re picking a mind. That and finding someone you can imagine still wanting to talk to in ten years.

26. The length of something doesn’t decide its worth.
A relationship that ends is not necessarily a relationship that failed.

27. Your initial gut feeling about a person is almost never wrong.

28. Your gut feeling about everything else often is.

Act III: The Resolution (Rules 29-42): On legacy, meaning, and making peace with what is.

29. The most important decision you will ever make is with whom you procreate - you're deciding both half the genes of your child and much of how pleasant the raising of them will be.
Pick someone for whom unfairness hurts (in both directions), because you don’t need to police someone already policing themselves.

30. Parent/Child is life’s hardest relationship.
It’s defined by irreconcilable inequality. You are the great project of your parent’s lives, a project you didn’t ask to be part of, and often want nothing to do with. Your children are the great project of your lives, a project they didn’t ask to be part of, and you’re damn sure not going to make it easy for them to quit, the ungrateful bastards. Don’t they know how much you suffered for…

Everything you do wrong in the one role, will be done wrong to you in the other. Much of your life will be spent failing and ruing failures in this relationship, yet failure is inevitable. Accept it. Do your best. Move on.

31. If you don’t realise, often, that you’re wrong, you’re wrong all the time.
There’s no shame in saying “I don’t know.” There’s is shame in never changing your mind, because what are the odds that you got everything right first time? Dogmas make rubbish pets, but catmas are great company.

32. Depression isn't sadness, it's more of a paralysing despair.
The clinically depressed are the most accurate appraisers of their situation. If you no longer believe you can win, there's no shame in stopping to play for a while, or changing games. Also, suicide is not not wanting to live, it's not wanting to suffer any more.

33. Psychedelics are really, really wonderful (for you, Adam, not necessarily for everyone).
All the greatest days of your life will be on drugs, which sounds sad, but then everything is a drug, including, and especially, love. Some drugs teach (hello psilocybin), others drugs take. Choose wisely. You don't have to worry about becoming stuck there, you have to worry that you’ll realise just how stuck you are here, optimised by evolution not for happiness, but to want.

34. There are quality people, quantity people, and scarcity people.
Quality people get off on experiencing the best, quantity people from experiencing a lot, and scarcity people on how little they need. They rarely understand each other.

(You are a quantity person, Adam.)

35. There is nothing quite as alluring as a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything.
All models are wrong but some models are useful (thanks again, discordianism!). Useful Fictions explores this excellently.

36. It arises… to pass away.

37. “The four most important words in history are once upon a time.”
We are the storytelling ape. Our stories need an audience because:

38. "Good, bad, what's the difference? The most difficult thing for a human being is to knock on silence." - Saul Bellow.

People often ask me how I’ve managed to be a full-time writer for the past ten years—through all the frequent bouts of failure, loneliness, and slow improvement. While I could say that poverty and I suit each other, I usually reply with that quote. Only if writing becomes both its own form of companionship, and its own reward, can you survive those long silences waiting for one of your many knocks to be answered.

Knock knock.

39. The older you become, the greater the admiration you will have for the Amish.
If they’ve picked 1999 (dial-up internet was the sweetest internet), instead of 1850, you’d be churning butter right now.

40. “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
Thanks, Ghandi.

41. The average cloud ways more than three thousand tonnes. Everything is heavier than it looks.

You are heavier than you look. Even if you think you’ve let something go from your mind, you’re probably still luggingit around in your body.

42. The therapist often knows within the first ten minutes what the person’s problem is. Therapy is about preparing them to where they’re not only ready to hear it, but able to tell it to themselves.

You can’t change people’s minds. You can ask them interesting questions while you wait and hope they change them.

And that’s it, I suppose. The middle of the story. Still messy, still uncertain, but with increasing respect for the twists and turns in the plot.

Happy Birthday to me.
Happy Birthday to me.

.

This is the story of the love of my life: a six-foot-two bald man with an enormous nose. We share a first, middle, and last name. For I am what’s known as a narcissist.

I didn’t know my mind was odd until my new girlfriend, Evelyn, started poking around in it. “Tell me some of your worst-of reel,” she asked as we lay in bed, covers pulled up over our naked bodies.

“What’s a worst-of reel?”

“It’s like the five most embarrassing moments of your life.”

I tried to think of a single thing I’d ever done wrong; nope, there was nothing. “How often does yours play?”

“All the time, pretty much, unless I distract myself. It’s particularly bad when I meditate. Have you ever done any meditation? There are these crazy retreats where…”

I scrambled to sit up, many of our early differences now making sense – why she couldn’t sit with her thoughts without diving into her phone while I could stare at a wall for an hour. Why she’d slam back two drinks as we arrived at an event to take the edge off her nerves while I barely ever drank. If you only care what five people on earth think of you, even if there’s steak at the dinner party, there’s very little at stake. Her mind was a hostile place while mine… wasn’t, which made it so surprising that she’d become a workaholic political spokesperson out braving the world’s daily shitstorms while I was a stay-at-home memoirist, braving absolutely nothing at all. That I didn’t understand, not yet anyway…

Despite our differences, or perhaps because of them, we kept dating until, “Why can’t you ever queue?” she asked at the Post Office where I was keeping myself busy hopping from foot to foot and tutting loudly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think, deep down, I just don’t really understand why someone isn’t blowing a trumpet and inviting me to the front.”

She laughed, my favourite sound in the universe. “Do you think you might be a bit of a narcissist? Let’s do a test.”

I took out my phone and took the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test – picking the most appropriate from forty pairs of statements:

Being an authority doesn’t mean that much to me -or- People always seem to recognise my authority.

I prefer to blend in with the crowd -or- I like to be the centre of attention.

I scored 24/40: deep into narcissist territory (the average for US adults is 15.3). We repeated the test for her: 1/40. It would have been zero if I hadn’t talked her into picking – people like to hear me tell stories. I liked to hear her tell stories. Not as much as I liked to tell her stories, but let’s not make this all about me.

Ha. Yeah, right.

“People,” she read from her phone, “with Narcissistic Personality Disorder have exaggerated feelings of self-importance and a diminished ability to empathise.” She shook her head. “That’s not you.”

“Are you kidding? It’s so me.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “I’m fine with it,” I said, because I thought that’s what a narcissist would think. She seemed fine with it too because we soon decided to have a child, and together, even. We spent a year and a half trying to conceive; first for fun with the help of wine; then as work with the help of fertility apps; then as financial masochism with the help of clinics where Evelyn was probed, biopsied, drugged, up-and-down regulated and harvested while I… occasionally masturbated in a cupboard.

The fertility industrial complex—cavernous, interminable, dehumanising—made our very different minds diverge further. Evelyn’s, as was its tendency, really turned the screws on her. She became utterly convinced it would never work; that her body was beyond redemption. She lost small things – sleep, hope, being able to experience human joy, and then a big thing – the patience to listen to me talk about all the great metaphors I’d nailed that day, instead, becoming prone to violent, spontaneous acts of emotional combustion and obsessed with researching fertility science, chasing her own cure.

Narcissists need control, or at least its illusion, but infertility offered me none; it’s just a torturous biological limbo where if you have money, science has Hopium it’s selling. I’ve always assumed reality will be what I want it to be, and so I offered her little except platitudes it would all be fine. When it wasn’t fine, I hid in my work, if you can call what I do all day work.

“How about therapy?” she asked, on the subway back from our one thousand and seventh fertility clinic appointment. “I always thought I’d be good at it,” I said. “But it’s like eight years of studying. I don’t have the patience.”

“I meant us going.”

“Oh. Why would we go? Our only problem is infertility.”

“I used to think that too,” she said, but I heard only I think so too.

Then there was a Saturday, deep in the nadir of our relationship, when I came home and found my bag packed in the hallway. The same bag I’d packed in my last two breakups. It was happening again; it couldn’t happen again.

Fortunately, she wasn’t kicking me out. Instead, a last-minute place had come free on a ten-day, silent, Buddhist Vipassana retreat she’d been bugging me to go on, the same one whose flyers she’d dotted around the apartment. I protested that I’d already met all my demons. She joked that someone whose passion was themselves should really know that person better. I needed to go help myself so I could come back and help her; infertility was too heavy to carry alone.

The retreat centre was squashed between a meadow and forest—a weird, quiet, sad, gender-separated place full of rules (no talking, no eye contact, no stimulants, exercise, reading or writing). The first forty-five-minute block of meditation felt like a decade dragged over spikes dipped in acid, and there were eleven more hours that day. During these sessions, my mind constantly searched for ways to distract me—an endless cascade of songs, memories, ideas, traumas, fears and unhappy childhood memories shouted, my mind turning screws I didn’t even know it had, in what rapidly became the worst week of my life.

Somehow, I limped through until day four, where, after a particularly torturous session I ran crying into the woods, punched a tree, and talked to a worm which… talked back, scaring me so much that I furiously murdered some nearby ants, got a confusing erection, and had a realisation – what I was experiencing, this madness and mania, was similar to what Evelyn was going through—intrusive thoughts becoming dominant, overwhelming thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. I felt this, not intellectually but emotionally, how terrified and lonely she must be and how spectacularly I was failing to help her. Which meant I was capable of much more empathy than I realised (and an internet test suggested). Shocked, I went back to the meditation hall and began actually listening to the teachers, resolving to stop hiding from the unpleasant things looping in my mind.

The next six days were still awful, but productive. It’s very easy to tell yourself stories, I should probably have known as a professional storyteller. The retreat was about changing some I began telling myself in childhood, and one in a post office queue. I am not a narcissist, although I know how to think like one, something that started when I was a shy and sensitive kid in an environment that didn’t value those things. Feeling too much, I began telling myself I felt little. Similarly, if people don’t like you, you can either decide they’re right or that they’re very wrong. Repeat a lie often enough and you’ll start to believe in its truth. But these were choices, like the choice I’d made to become a memoirist—intentionally making my life small and self-centred. Choices that made me an emotionally unavailable partner and would make me the same kind of father, if I were lucky enough to have that chance.

Back in the real world, I did a lot of apologising and took a break from work, not wanting to write about happier times until we’d made this one, even childless, as good as it could be. Then, after we’d both given up hope, we found ourselves in yet another doctor’s office, sobbing with joy for a change, seeing the first snowy glimpses of our daughter on the tiny screen.

Worms don’t talk to me anymore, I’m happy to report. Because of the retreat and all that’s followed it, I know myself better but love myself much less today which has created all this extra space to love others, and with more voluminous intensity than I ever knew possible. Evelyn and I often knock a drink back together when we arrive at a party now, just to take the edge off our nerves. I care what everyone thinks of me. Which means I buy presents now. Arrive places on time. Listen before I talk. I work less, but my work is better—readers like vulnerability, and now I’m being more honest with myself and the page, I can tell richer stories.

I have a worst-of reel now too, looping the times I’ve let Evelyn down. But a mildly hostile mind has its uses: keep you honest. I pay close attention to the stories I tell, checking they’re still true, and so, I need to correct something that I hope is already blindingly obvious…

This was actually the story of the loves of my life—a workaholic political spokesperson with impossibly thick blonde hair and a curious mix of intellectual strength and social anxiety, who pushes against her weaknesses, ignores her hostile mind, and makes her world large, not small. We don’t share a name, first, middle or last, but we share just about everything else.

A slightly different version of this was published by The NYT’s Modern Love series (paywall).

It was inspired by/adapted from my memoir, That Time I lost My Mind.

I was thinkin of coming 4 a visit.

I stared at the Facebook message from my brother, Kevin (both a name and a diagnosis). A full sentence—odd. On the rare occasions he contacted me, it was normally to forward a video of someone falling off something, being hit by something, or being hit by something with such velocity that they fell off something.

Was this a question? A request? A statement? He'd never visited me before. In fact, in the six years I'd called Berlin home, he'd never shown the slightest interest in what that home looked like.

Questions weren't his thing. Curiosity wasn't his thing. I wasn't his thing.

And my girlfriend at that time, A, was least his thing of all. My brother is a person who derives enormous delight from winding people up. He is a feather ruffler. A button pusher. A relationship arsonist.

A is a natural born protagonist. Always the central figure in an epic, noble battle to prove the world wrong and herself right. She is loud, opinionated, expressive, and unapologetically herself, no matter where you put her. Igniting her outrage is trivial. Kevin did it gladly. The family worked to keep them apart; they were both fine with this.

"Do you think there's any way we could say no?" I asked her, over dinner.

"If there was, I would tell you."

Okay, I wrote him back. Send me the dates.

Those dates coincided with my sixth anniversary in Berlin. I was proud of this milestone. That somehow—more through luck than understanding, as Germans liked to say—I'd escaped the small British town of my birth, and its similarly sized mentality. Each day here I walked the wide, proud streets of a place that had mattered before, mattered still, and would matter again. As I walked, the city's ghosts whispered to me in raspy voices. "If you're here with us, you must matter too."

To fit in here, I'd had to change everything about myself to become like every other expat Berliner: a Guardian reading, spluffin eating, probiotic shake drinking, extravagantly bearded, polyamorous marxist knitter. All things my brother had either never heard of, or hated. But this visit was my chance to pull him free from the mud of his provincial ignorance. Here I could make him clean and new and worldly and, perhaps even, woke. In the process, we might become something we'd not been since I was ten and he was seven: friends.

I leaned against the pillar in the arrivals area of Schönefeld Airport, pretending there was calm where there was only slow bubbling apprehension. I searched—while looking like I was not searching—for a head like mine, just made larger through the enthusiastic consumption of The Colonel's Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The first thing I actually noticed were his shoes: enormous, laced, silver canoes excessively branded by the Nike corporation. My eyes moved up to the baggy black tracksuit bottoms, the dark green, similarly oversized hoodie. He looked like he was trying to both hide his body and make it take up the maximum space possible. On his head was a chunky pair of red Beats headphones. It was a rag-tag ensemble that threatened sport, that threatened rap, that threatened alleyway muggery.

"Alwight," he said. I leaned in for a hug and he swerved as if it were a falling piano. "Easy now, Dildo Baggins."

A first sharp shock of irritation hit me. I stared into his enormous bucket, chestnut-brown eyes—my eyes—and was reminded that there is no head, on any shoulders, anywhere on earth that irks me like his. Perhaps because it's so similar to mine.

"How was your flight?"

He shrugged. "I could bloody murder a hot dog."

We got him a hot dog. Then we sat in the rattling, boxy train car that shunted us towards the city.

"'Ow long you stayin' for then?" I said, noticing I'd already slipped back into my local dialect—that of a toothless, 1950s, cockney, window-cleaning pickpocket.

"Free nights," he replied, meaning three nights. Neither of us had ever mastered our language's TH. He gazed out the window. "Why is everything, like … so dirty?"

"What do you mean? Dirty?"

"You know, with like … all this scribbling and stuff?"

"Graffiti?"

"Yeeeeah."

Here was my first chance to educate him. I sat up straight. "Because of rampant gentrification in the inner city, communities are being ripped apart, and the underprivileged marginalised. Rather than seeing graffiti as a public nuisance, I think it's more accurate to see it as a cry for help from those losing out in a multicultural society."

He pulled his phone out and checked if he had any messages.

"Graffiti is a way for the poor to reclaim, in some small way, the public spaces late-stage capitalism denies them."

It had been a magnificent speech.

"Yeeeeeeah, Imeanlike welll." He had very interesting diction. He gripped his words by the neck and twisted them, then released them dazed and dizzy, only to lunge for them once again as they ran from his lips. "I guess that's sort of one way of looking at it. BUT. I mean. Right. Onthatlastwall … it said fuck balls so, you know, what do you thinkkkk the underprivileged and marginalised are trying to say with that?"

"Fuck balls?"

"Yeah. Fuck balls."

He observed me, his head slightly askance, as if I were a bug he was considering squashing. "I guess… I'm not sure what the underprivileged and marginalised are trying to say with that."

I wasn’t either. I pulled a piece of paper from my back pocket. "I made a list of things we could do. There's loads of culture here.” I began reading the names of the museums, exhibitions, and landmarks we could visit.

He reached over and snatched the list from my hand. He crumpled it in his giant bear mitts as he read. "Yeah, well … we could do this stuff, I guess, but it would be, like, a waste of both your time and mine."

This sentence knocked me deeper into my seat. How often are we in the company of such unabashed honesty? "Well, what do you want to do then?"

He pushed out his lips. "How about we go play pool?"

"But you can do that anywhere."

"So?"

In our apartment’s courtyard, he made his acquaintance with the beautiful Dutch bicycle I'd rented for him. "What am I supposed to do with that then?"

"I thought you'd try riding it?"

He sat on it and rang its bell. "Blimey. Not sure I remember how."

"Sure you do. It's like riding a bike."

He began a short, wobbly lap of the courtyard. Short because a wall came out of nowhere and surprised him and he ended up in a heap on the floor. He jumped up in a rage and kicked the saddle. "Shit off."

I laughed so much I winded myself.

We biked across the river and just about made it to a pool place near Warschauer Straße station. As we entered it, his shoulders dropped, and the swagger returned to his steps. He nodded at the people on the next table. They nodded back.

"Let’s bet,” he said, as he racked.

"Fine. Loser pays?"

He nodded. "Get a round in then as well, aye? Jägers as well, as a cheeky chaser."

"It's 5pm?"

"I'm on holiday."

Balls (unfucked) disappeared swiftly into holes. "Remember that Le Tissier free-kick goal against Wimbledon?" he asked, as he potted a tricky black to take a 3–1 lead. "Where he flicked it and then BAM?"

I walked down a long corridor, opened a fire door, ducked under some piping, walked down two flights of stairs and stopped before a large mental cupboard marked THE 1990s. As kids, we had season tickets for Chelsea Football Club, and our father would take us down to London every other Saturday on the train. Our first taste of a big city. Of a place that had mattered before, mattered still, and would matter again. It came with this novel feeling I didn't have the word for yet: anonymity.

It thrilled me.

That season ticket was the last time we had shared a hobby. The last time we were close. "I remember," I said. "Hell of a strike that."

"The one against Manchester United was even better, maybe. Where he chipped Schmeichel."

"Good shout, that."

We drank our beers, downed our Jägers, and sank our balls. I tried to keep up with him, pretending I still regularly drank alcohol.

"You remember Rob Quinn?" he asked.

"No," I said. But I did. My brother liked to wind me up too, and he knew the thing I liked least was my past. I treated it like people treat the dentist—a place you go because something hurts, but where you find the root of the problem, then get out as quickly as possible.

"Sure you do. Beat you up that one time in middle school. Got four kids now. Says Hi."

“Hmm.”

He beat me 14–12 and took great delight in this. The whole evening seemed to delight him: getting drunk with his big brother in a pool hall. It was happening in Berlin, but it could have been happening anywhere. The where wasn't important to him. Maybe it shouldn't have been to me, either.

A pretended to be asleep when we got home.

The next morning I found him at the stove, frying steak. He was in his boxer shorts, which were as loose as everything else he owned. The elastic had given way and the back hung halfway down his ass cheeks.

"Pull your pants up. And what are you doing?"

"Making breakfast."

"Steak?"

"Breakfast of champions."

"Morning." A entered the room, saw what my brother was wearing—or failing to wear—and froze like a startled deer.

"Alwight, darling," he said without turning around, half his ass still hanging free in the breeze.

"What you two doing today?" A asked, still hovering in the door-frame.

"I thought me and you might spend some time together?" he said, then laughed. "I can remind you of how you picked the worse brother."

Terror flooded her face. "He's joking, right? Anyway, I'm busy."

"Doing what then?" He asked.

Her eyes looped. I have never met a worse liar. "Things?"

"Wound pretty tight, ain't she?" he said, as she disappeared from view.

There is something enchanting about being around people unafraid to be their unvarnished selves. It was a huge part of why I’d fallen in love with A. A huge part of why the two of them couldn't be anywhere near each other. Neither of them knew how to fake it.

I had no hope of making him something he was not. Which meant my only option was to try to tolerate who he was.

The days passed. He ate steak a further five times. "I'm not into that foreign rubbish," he said whenever I tried to feed him something that wasn't dead cow.

On his last night he agreed, reluctantly, to go for pizza. We biked to a small Italian restaurant near the Landwehr Canal. He insisted on ordering a Hawaiian pizza, which they didn't have on the menu because Hawaiian is pizza for people who want pizza, but who also want to humiliate it.

Eventually, the chef found some dusty tin of pineapple chunks in the back of a cupboard. As we sat at a small wooden table, I said, "Do you ever feel like you're the shit sibling?"

The words just fell out. Only after did I realise how sharp they were. He stopped shovelling pizza into his mouth. His eyes wandered away. He put the slice down and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his hoodie. "I thought you were the shit sibling?"

"What?"

"Yeah." Another chunky, shoulder-bouncing laugh. "Everyone knows that."

"But I'm …" I wanted to say successful, but knew I needed a more modest word.

"—self-involved?" he offered before I could find it.

"Independent," I corrected.

"How often do you contribute to the family WhatsApp?" he asked. "Or remember anyone's birthdays?"

"I haven't been in there in months. And I don't do birthdays, you know that."

"And Christmas?"

"Not really my thing, Christmas."

"Mother's Day?"

"It's a different date here. Hard to keep track."

"How old is Mum?"

My voice trailed off. "I don't know."

"Dad?"

"Older?"

He was enjoying himself now, a mad glint in his eye. "See? I mean, I don't wanna be like, rude about it, but what exactly does the family get from you? Gem’s the responsible one. But you?"

Our older sister, Gemma, lived down the road from our parents. When we no longer have parents, it will be her who holds the three of us together, or we will come apart.

We will come apart.

I rubbed at the creases of my forehead. "I offer a literary dynasty and fascinating anecdotes."

"Who even reads your books?"

"Mum?"

He looked doubtful. "And anyway, you got to pick first."

"What?"

"Being the brainy one."

It was my turn to laugh. "You wanted to be the brainy one?"

"Couldn't, could I. By the time I arrived, you'd taken that slot. Which is all right, I guess. Reading and stuff, not really my thing. Boring. So I took sports and being funny and, well …" he swept a hand through what remained of his lank brown hair, "being the good-looking one."

"You're not the good-looking one."

"The ladies say otherwise."

"And I'm the funny one."

"Keep telling yourself that, treacle. Maybe you'll even believe it one day."

We continued eating. In amongst the flagrant, fragrant bullshit, there was some truth to what he was saying. All siblings have to specialise, and I'd had a three-year head start choosing mine. But he was wrong: Gemma was the brainy one. I'd made the classic middle-child choice: being wayward. I’d picked not wanting anything from anyone. I’d picked moving thousands of miles away from my family to get more of that sweet, sweet anonymity I'd first tasted in London.

I saw how when I compared myself to Kev, I focused on the areas of life I cared about. Which were, unsurprisingly, the areas I was best at. I neglected to think about, or place value on, the areas of life where he was better than me: making friends, holding down jobs, drinking alcohol, playing sport, being one of the lads, learning trades, driving cars. It was not that we competed—it was that we'd found ways not to have to compete.

As we arrived at Treptower Park station, on his way back to the airport, he stopped in the middle of the platform. "It's alright," he said. "Berlin. Once you get used to the smell."

"Take it easy," I said, as I put him on the train.

He leaned in for a hug. "You too, fella."

As the train pulled away, I put on music and walked home, thankful that I got to live where I didn't belong. That I got to move through my day as an exotic, yet anonymous thing. As the middle of a story no one knew the start of. I'd failed to make him interested in Berlin's history and while you can argue that we owe the past a certain respect, I was starting to think that its opposite might also be true. That maybe the present's greatest freedom is the right to be uninterested, unperturbed, willfully ignorant of the past. To simply refuse to carry its heavy cultural bags. That it’s this disinterest that would most annoy history’s dictators, warlords, and empire builders. That it’s okay to ignore the ghosts of Berlin when they whisper.

I stopped to read the graffiti on the side of what was once a border watchtower. There it was again, in loose, curly blue script at the height of my hip, underlined twice.

Fuck balls.